


Paper Heart Dream

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [95]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: 1920s, Alternate Universe - Artists, Artist Steve Rogers, M/M, Professional Jealousy, Rapidly Approaching Kindness, Writer Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-27
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-17 08:35:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15457425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: At first, Buck didn’t notice the sounds.





	Paper Heart Dream

**Author's Note:**

> Prompts: Artist Colony and "I came to this resort to get away from my friends for a little while and plus I just got dumped by my stupid pig boyfriend and you’re staying in the room next door to mine and you can hear me crying a lot and now you’re being extra friendly what’s your angle?" Prompts from this [generator](http://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).

At first, Buck didn’t notice the sounds. Or if he did, he chalked them up to passing bird or the wind or some shit; the kind of isolation the colony offered, the rush back into nature, still made him feel like he was in a foreign land, someplace that didn’t really want him there, that’d do whatever it could to chase him back to Brooklyn, back to real life, away from this paper heart dream of being a writer.

Who was he kidding? He couldn’t write. 

Sure, he could put words on a page, but any idiot with a typewriter could do that. Ok, and, the selection committee for this artist retreat place had accepted his work; he’d applied and they’d read his stuff and they’d invited him anyway. That had to say something about his relative talents, right?

Those stories were easier to tell himself during the day, when the sun was shining and the breeze carried his cigarette smoke up and off of his cabin’s tiny porch and he could fill the silence with the clack of the keys, with memories of taxicabs and people and that certain unsettled rush that the sidewalks and side alleys of Brooklyn seemed to hold.

But later, when night drew the curtains and the crickets took over, he would squint at the pages he’d written and fucking despair. Because there was nothing there. No heart, no verve, no idea he had to communicate, had to get out of his head and onto the paper or else he’d die. The stuff he was making, the stories he was writing there in the most bucolic of settings, they didn’t breathe. They couldn’t. What he was building every morning were corpses.

It was especially galling because the guy next door, in a cabin that shared a wall, was a goddamned speed demon. He was a painter--abstract-y stuff, it looked like, based on the stuff he set out on his porch to dry--and he churned out more work in two days than Bucky had that whole first fucking week. It was embarrassing, was what it was.

He was quiet, the painter, pretty much kept to himself, and that Bucky appreciated; he had no interest in idle chit chat. It was hard enough to go to the main building each morning for breakfast and have to see everybody, have to nod a greeting every ten seconds when all Buck wanted to do was have his damn toast and coffee in peace. Sitting around the long, hand-carved table worn down by the dozens pairs of hands that had touched it over the years would be a dozen frazzled humans, everybody doing his best to exude confidence, or at the very least, productivity. There was Natasha, a potter, and Wanda, a mosaic maker, and Sam, another canvas rat who liked to work in multimedia instead of paint. There were others, too, but Buck made a point of trying to sit in the midst of those three, whom he found the least pretentious and least asshole-ish of the whole lot. 

His neighbor, though, Steve, Mr. Prolific, Mr. Big Smile, Mr. Incredibly Pleasant Even at Seven AM, always sat at the far end near their hostess, the owner of the colony, a regal creature named Peggy. She was the nexus of the hardest charging among them, the ones who’d come to the lake having already made a bit of a name for themselves, having had a quick bite of the apple of artistic success. Meaning money. Meaning, Peggy drew to her the ones who were able to make a living from their art, a state that Bucky both resented and envied. He was tired of being a dock rat, that was damn true, but see the toadiness on display at breakfast each morning, the one the successful set swooned and mooned over Peggy like she was some damn debutante and not a wealthy dame in her fifties made Bucky feel ill. They already had money, at least some, and here he was hauling ropes and shucking crates when he should’ve spent every day chained to his typewriter, a pack of Lucky’s and half-empty mugs of cold coffee and a worn out Roget’s at his side.

He wanted their success, Steve’s, even a hint of it. And yet the possibility of recognition scared the shit of him.

So what he was writing was crap.

The noises at night then, when they started, had to work hard to get through the filter of bricks he’d built around his own head, not to mention the cloud of Wild Turkey. The first night, he thought birds; the second he blamed the wind; and only when they woke him up on the third did he try to figure out where they were coming from. 

Bucky sat up and turned on the small bedside light. Not from the open window, the sound; only the echoes of the lake there. Not the door, bolted twice from the inside. So where--?

Another pulse of the noise, eerier now that he was listening, really hearing it. It sounded, Buck realized, so fucking  _ sad _ \--and it was coming from behind him, wasn’t it? From somewhere beyond the wall that lay between his cabin and Steve’s.

He tilted his head back, pressed his ear to the wall, and waited. Ten seconds. Twenty. Then it came again, louder this time, like the noise was leaning against the wall, too, its mouth near Bucky’s ear.

It was Steve. Jesus christ, Bucky thought, it really was. Mr. Perfect himself. And it sounded like he was bawling his eyes out but trying to smother it, somehow, to hide, to be sure that nobody would hear.

Later, he wasn’t sure what made him do it. A chance to see a great man put under? A childish desire to reassure himself that there really wasn’t a monster under his bed? Simple curiosity, maybe. Whatever the reason, the result was the same: Bucky slipped out of bed and padded across the floor and in two shakes, ten heartbeats, he was putting a gentle fist to Steve’s door.  
  



End file.
